Google advanced operators v2

Following my last post about Google’s advanced operators and how they can be used to refine your search to be more specific I will move onto a few other useful operators.

cache:
The cache operator is fairly useful as it shows us what Google saw on its last crawl of a given site. This is extremely useful if you have a dynamic site or your rankings have changed for some unknown reason. You can check if Google tried to crawl your site while it was down or had scripting error issues at the time.

link:
The link operator is another of the more useful of the bunch. This tells us the location of links pointing to a site which Google recognises. It is worth noting that this operator is not hugely accurate and can miss links but is useful as a quick search.

related:
The related operator is fairly useful and can be a bit of fun too. It will give you a list of sites which are related to the given URL. For example, if you use the related operator with google.com (related:google.com) you will find a list of rival search engines and directories. So if you want to shop around it is a pretty cool search toy.

Google has even built an operator which can make using these even easier. If we use the info operator (info:www.somesite.com) this will return quick links to each of the mentioned operators along with the site: operator.

Unlike the previous operators mentioned, these ones tend not to merge too well together and are used best by themselves.

Adrian Mursec – SEO Programmer